by Linda Jaivin
A photograph in National Geographic depicting a group of beautiful Mapuche girls from Chile inspired me to claim that I was South American, spinning a tale to anyone who would listen about a Spanish conquistador and his dusky native rose. That worked well until someone pointed out that there hadn’t been any conquistadors for about four centuries. Then I saw Seven Samurai and decided that I was the love child of Toshirô Mifune; my auntie and uncle, having lived through the war, didn’t like this story at all.
‘You might be part something,’ they conceded, ‘but it would be something respectable.’ Studying my face in the mirror for clues, all I could see was part-disappointment, part-hope. Respectability didn’t interest me all that much.
One day, browsing the shelves of the local library, I stumbled across an old book. Its hard, clothbound cover had the mustardy hue of old manuscripts. In the centre of the cover was the imprint of a carved seal, Chinese characters printed the colour of dried blood. Above this simple, mysterious decoration was the title China Under the Empress Dowager. The book smelled faintly of mould.
Its frontispiece was a black-and-white photograph of a woman seated in front of an ornate screen decorated with delicate floral motifs: I recognised magnolias and plum blossoms. To her left and right, mounted on carved wooden supports, were large ceramic dishes piled high with glossy fruit. Peaches? Apples? It was hard to tell. Overhead, a banner bore more Chinese writing and under her feet lay a richly woven rug. The woman, the Empress Dowager of the title, was dressed in a magnificent robe, simple in design with its wide-sleeved jacket and full skirt, but sumptuous in detail, seemingly composed of beautifully stitched strips of silk brocade in what I guessed were contrasting colours. Over this she wore an even more dazzling vest consisting of panels of silk and embroidery that appeared to be fastened at the chest by a bejewelled clasp in the shape of a butterfly. Two carved and painted wooden platform soles the shape of a horse’s hooves peeked out from under the hem of her skirt, the toe of an embroidered slipper just visible atop the block that was closest to the hem. On her hands were bangles of jade. Filigreed gold nail protectors transformed the two last fingers of her hand into pointed talons. She wore what looked like drop-pearl earrings. Her black hair, parted just off-centre, was slicked down and so glossy that the lamplight was reflected on each side of her part like moonlight on a dark sea. Upon her head was perched the most remarkable headdress, like gem-strewn bat wings. Her face was smooth and unblemished, her chin small and delicate. Her mouth was slightly open and, under her straight eyebrows, her long dark eyes held my own with what seemed at the time an almost eerily knowing, vaguely amused expression. The caption announced the photograph to be of The ‘Holy Mother’, Her Majesty Tz Hsi. (From a Photograph taken in 1903.)
On the opposite page, I saw the publication date was listed as MCMXI. Under the title came the sort of fusty elaboration I loved in old books:
BEING THE HISTORY OF THE LIFE AND
TIMES OF TZ HSI
COMPILED FROM STATE PAPERS AND THE
PRIVATE DIARY OF THE COMPTROLLER OF
HER HOUSEHOLD
BY
J.O.P. BLAND AND E. BACKHOUSE
ILLUSTRATED
It might not have seemed the sort of thing that would hook a fifteen-year-old in … what was it, 1970? But I was an odd kid, especially in the context of a small coastal town in Australia. All that reading in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature had primed me to enjoy what others might have run from screaming. I settled myself on the floor, back against the wall under the window, and plunged into a Byzantine narrative of degenerate rulers, powerful concubines, rival clans, oracular forecasts and conniving eunuchs. There were rebellions, wars, sieges, invasions and epic struggles for power – and all this, wonderfully I thought, with a clever and beautiful woman at the centre.
Yehonala had been born in 1835 into a noble but not terribly well-to-do Manchu clan in Peking. The Manchus (Mrs Jin’s lot) were a nomadic tribe that had ruled China since 1644 as the Ch’ing (today spelled Qing) dynasty. They weren’t ethnic Han Chinese, but they produced some of imperial China’s greatest rulers. When she was fifteen – my age when I first read about her – Yehonala was paraded before the mother of the teenage Hsien-feng emperor along with about sixty other eligible young Manchu girls. It was a bit like a modern beauty contest – the emperor’s mother judged them on deportment and personality as well as looks. The Empress Dowager (as the mother of the emperor was called) chose twenty-eight of the girls for her son’s concubines, organised into grades; Yehonala was one of them, and she was given the rank of Kuei Jen (guiren).
Yehonala was smart. Her family had educated her well. She had a head for politics, and soon she was advising the emperor on matters of state. When, seven years after entering the palace, she bore him his first son and heir, her stock rose even further. But it was a rough time for China. Western imperialist powers had waged several ‘Opium Wars’ to force an unwilling China to accept foreign trade, including the import of Indian-grown opium. In the final humiliation of the Opium Wars, French and British soldiers (whom Yehonala quite reasonably called ‘pestilent barbarians’) burned down the Yuanmingyuan, an exquisite jewel of a summer palace that had been constructed over many acres and several generations of the emperor’s ancestors. Soon after, the thirty-year-old Hsien-feng emperor died, allegedly of shame.
After the emperor’s death, Yehonala ruled as co-regent on behalf of her son with her cousin Sakota, who, although the emperor’s chief consort (and empress), had only managed to give him a daughter. Yehonala and Sakota sat together behind a decorative screen at court, speaking on behalf of the child-ruler, who fidgeted on the Dragon Throne as his officials arrayed themselves before him to discuss matters of state. Yehonala was not only more politically minded than Sakota, but ambitious too. It was not long before, by tacit agreement, she became the de facto ruler of the court, and thus China itself. Her son grew up wild and died before he finished his teenage years, officially of smallpox but possibly of syphilis.
After her son’s death, Yehonala, known as the Empress Dowager Tz-Hsi (Cixi in today’s spelling), manoeuvred her nephew onto the throne as the Kuang-hsü emperor. In 1898, when he was twenty-six, a group comprising some of China’s most progressive thinkers persuaded him to adopt educational, financial and other reforms that would strengthen China and bring it into the modern world. One hundred days later, and backed by a conservative cabal at the court, including her chief eunuch Li Lien-ying (rumoured to be her lover and not a eunuch at all), the Empress Dowager placed the emperor under house arrest and resumed her regency. He remained under arrest until his death, one day before her own, in 1908. Not surprisingly, I would later learn, historians still argue over Yehonala’s legacy today.
China Under the Empress Dowager included an excerpt from the 1900 diary of a high official in the Qing court, Ching Shan. Ching Shan complained that his sons ‘mocked’ him for being deaf and observed that they were bad kids, unlikely to get as far in the world as he had. One of his sons murdered him not long after he wrote those words.
A lot of the book flew straight over my head at the time. While I couldn’t possibly have understood the complexities of the world it described, I was intoxicated by its exotic nature. Even if many of the names refused to stick, it beat the lists of English queens and kings that passed for history at school. As for the story of Federation, ‘wake me when it’s over’ was my attitude back then and it hasn’t changed much since.
On the day I found the book, I sat there reading, mesmerised, until the library lights flickered to announce closing time, plucking me out of the Forbidden City and dumping me back on the Central Coast, leaving me blinking in genuine surprise. Tucking the precious volume under my arm, I approached the checkout desk. A queue had formed. People cradled armfuls of books, shifting their weight from leg to leg while Mrs Cakely, a thickset woman with a menacing bouffant and an aura of lavender, hunched over her desk, sliding the index cards from their poc
kets in the books’ inside back covers, placing the cards in a pile, tapping their edges into order against the desk, writing down the borrower’s name and reaching for her date stamp. Chunk, chunk. Those were the days before computerisation, magnetic tagging and alarmed exits. It occurred to me that this book was far too precious to check out. If I checked it out, the day would come when I would have to return it. Anticipating that I wouldn’t like that at all, I slipped it into my book bag and, undetected, strolled out into the waning sunshine with my prize.
By then, I was old enough to wear my two jade bracelets. Their clinking and chiming irritated some of my teachers, and Elsie too when she was in a mood, but I loved it. It was my soundtrack. It still is. I realised that jade went with China; the bracelets in the photograph of the Empress Dowager looked exactly, I fancied, like my own. (Mrs Jin, by the way, was deeply fascinated by my bracelets.) Somewhere else I read that the Chinese language had a long list of words just to describe the sound of jade striking jade: qiangqiang, chengcheng, dingding, lingling, langlang, shanshan. And that was that. I was hooked. China brimmed with the history I craved for myself, and its people spoke the language of jade. I began to look at Jacob Woo differently. He’d got contacts by then, and didn’t seem as much of a dag, which helped. I made my decision. If I had an exotic ‘part’, then it was going to be Chinese. Or Manchu – not that I was entirely sure of the difference.
I began reading everything I could about China and the Empress Dowager. China was, at the time, another sort of closed kingdom, this one under the rule of Mao and the Communist Party. It was during the Cold War and communism was the be-all and end-all of evil regimes – and naturally, in that age of rebellion, an inspiration to idealistic young Australians far more focused on the wrongs of capitalism and the military-industrial complex that had driven us into Vietnam on America’s coattails.
China was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution when Whitlam led a Labor delegation to Peking in 1971; Australia established diplomatic relations with China the following year, 1972. I graduated from high school one year after that. I enrolled in university in Canberra, where I studied Chinese history and language in the company of one young man of frightening intelligence who would eventually become a star of the Sinological world and another, nerdish and hard-working, who would become prime minister. I was the quiet under-achiever at the back of the room, the girl with heavy glasses (plastic lenses had yet to be invented) that left a red stripe across my nose when I took them off, which in my self-consciousness I did a lot, even though I was practically blind without them. Chinese studies still had an esoteric and impractical aura that appealed to my contrary (not to mention bookish) nature and a whiff of the politically risqué, which drew me as well. I may have been an orphan but I was still a child of my generation. The main China-related careers available at the time were academic, diplomat or spy; I wasn’t convinced I was suited for any of these but I figured I’d work something out. Chinese studies was a passion, not a career move.
I started an honours thesis on ‘Western Representations of the Empress Dowager Cixi, from Portrait Artist Katharine Carl and Biographers Bland and Backhouse to Hollywood and Beyond’. By then, of course, I had learned of that talismanic book’s scandalous history – one of its authors, Sir Edmund Backhouse, had apparently entertained some kind of wildly perverse fantasy that he had actually been the Empress Dowager’s lover and he had personally forged Ching Shan’s diary – an extraordinary, if not entirely honourable achievement. Even now, I can’t explain exactly why I didn’t finish the thesis. Something to do with the combination of some obscure (and perfectly ordinary) personal drama and the fact that my obsessive nature, which on good days I think of as perfectionism, can make it hard for me to bring things – anything – to an end.
After university I moved to Sydney and shared a house in Glebe with a fractious social worker, a depressed rock musician, a chaotic philosophy student and the usual Sydney complement of giant flying cockroaches. I waited on tables for five or six months while grinding out a novel that drew both on the material in my thesis and also what I had learned about Backhouse from Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse. When I’d read China Under the Empress Dowager all those years before, I’d had no idea that Backhouse was, not to put too fine a point on it, not just a forger but a genius of perversity, an arms salesman, an occasional spy and a fantasist who single-handedly created more mischief and scandal than any other Westerner in China before or since. I became obsessed with his story.
I grandly titled my novel The Empress Lover. Like every other pot-boiler that’s ever been written about the ‘exotic East’, it was a sweeping saga stuffed full of gratuitous, sensationalist sex scenes, murder, history lessons and purple prose. But instead of having a cookie-cutter Western hero and a beautiful Chinese/Japanese/ other Asian-ese woman at the centre, I had a perverse, eccentric gay man and a powerful female ruler: Edmund Backhouse and Cixi, of course. It was the ultimate penny dreadful for our feminist, post-colonialist, post-modern times. I’d make a packet. I’d be the female James Clavell. (‘Who?’ you say now, but at the time, Tai-Pan, Shogun, Noble House and the rest made him the John Grisham, the Dan Brown and the Danielle Steel of Asia; I read his books back then with the sweet-and-sour sauce of grudging admiration, superiority and jealousy that’s a familiar taste to most aspiring young authors.)
The Empress Lover enjoyed no small success – in fact, it enjoyed no success whatsoever. No publisher showed the slightest interest in publishing it. I put it away and bought a ticket to Taiwan.
At the start of 1980, after a year or two of language study in Taiwan, I ended up in China – which was modernising, reforming, and opening up under Deng Xiaoping. I began work as a ‘foreign expert’ at the Foreign Languages Press. John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, a poor orphan, went to London and never looked back. I went to Beijing and did the same. Fanny Hill ended up working for Mrs Brown, me for the Ministry of Propaganda.
In both Taiwan and China, people readily agreed, volunteered even, that at least part of me had to belong to that country. I always had dark hair; I now dyed it black and cut it in a severe ‘China doll’ cut. I began to look more and more Chinese. My spoken Chinese became good enough to sustain the illusion. ‘You shimmer,’ Q once said to me.
Now, as I worked my way through this short letter, dense with mystery, all of my certainties and all of my fabrications melted one into another until even I couldn’t say which was which.
The writer of the letter told me that he had been searching for me for many years. If I was the person he had reason to believe I was, then he would pass on a gift from my ‘honourable ancestor’. The gift consisted of a long letter that would, he said, ‘make clear that which was opaque and illuminate that which had lain in darkness. Not that,’ he wrote, ‘you would want to disturb all those who lie in darkness.’ He named names. I closed my eyes, opened them and read the names again. They hadn’t changed.
He requested that I meet him that very evening at the Hour of the Rat. Eleven pm. Bu jian bu san. . Literally, ‘no see, no scatter’ – a common expression in the days before mobile phones, when people made appointments and waited, trying not to imagine accidents and hospitals when, half an hour or forty-five minutes after the appointed time, a person didn’t show.
Directly following this, he wrote my given Chinese name, Peilin, as if it were a complete sentence: . It took me aback, and it was a full few minutes before I began to make sense of it. Literally, pei is to wear on one’s person; lin is a type of jade ornament, traditionally worn dangling from one’s belt. It’s neither natural nor idiomatic to consider the combination of characters a command. But I realised that this was how my correspondent, writing with the linguistic freedom of the non-native speaker, had intended it: he was telling me, in coded fashion, to wear the jade bracelets my mother had left me. That wouldn’t be a problem. I had never stopped wearing them. My first Chinese teacher, commenting on thei
r beauty and the rare imperial dragon and phoenix motifs with which they were carved, had given me my Chinese name because of them.
But how did the writer of the letter know about the bracelets? What else did he know? Did he need to see them to know for certain that I was the person he was looking for? And how had he found me? Was the fact that the letter was written as it was, in a mix of languages, some kind of test? My head spun.
After the words ‘East City’ and the name of a hutong, he wrote fei chang dao. Fei chang dao was the second half of one of the most famous lines in a language that five thousand years of recorded history has crammed full of famous lines. The six-character line dao ke dao fei chang dao was the first sentence of the Daoist classic Dao De Jing, the one I’d mentioned to Lian that memorable day. The sentence has long bedevilled translators, beginning with the seventeenth-century Jesuits who wrestled it into Latin. Lin Yutang gave us: ‘The Tao that can be told of is not the absolute Tao.’ Robert G. Henricks: ‘As for the Way, the Way that can be spoken of is not the constant Way.’ Jean-Claude Lebensztejn: ‘La voie qu’on peut tracer n’est pas la voie constante’ and so on and so forth in every elegant and inelegant variation. Even Aleister Crowley gave it a burl: ‘The Tao-Path is not the All-Tao.’ You get the idea: fei chang dao = not real-deal Dao. On the other hand, on its own, and (mis) construed through the prism of the contemporary vernacular, which reads feichang as one word meaning ‘extraordinarily’ or ‘to an unusual extent’, you could possibly interpret it as meaning ‘extremely Dao’.
